Battlefield Posts: Thoughts on Blogging

The Magaret Island Swimbad. I thought I saw Andrea here.

Were this a journal and not a blog, I'd write pages about my thoughts in Budapest.

I'd think about how, in addition to family time, we are all having our parallel experiences. My boys are trying to play with other kids in the park. Suddenly they are the outsiders who can't speak the local tongue. They are seeing beggars in the streets, not disabled people, just really poor. They are realizing for first time what it means be an American, let alone New Yorkers. The bedtime conversations are fascinating.

I'd think about what it means to be a Jew. We toured (with an amazing guide) the old Jewish quarter. Hungary once had a thriving Jewish community. The world's second largest synagogue is here. But 600,000 people were killed during WWII. Now, there are only 50 people in the entire country who go to services on an average Saturday. The great synagogue now serves mainly as tourist attraction, a burial grounds and as a museum.

And I'd parse my thoughts about returning to a city where I once fell in love. I think about how rarely one gets to do that in life, and about how it feels to return to a place so full memories, decades years later, with my wife and my kids. I assume Andrea still lives here with her family. I thought I saw her at the pool, but sometimes it's hard to be sure what you've really seen.

But this is a blog, not a journal. Like a snapshot from the car window, it's just an attempt to freeze the blur as we speed along.

The Doheny Synagogue, interior. Built in 1849, it was meant to be church-like, to show how "Hungarian" the Jews were back then. The courtyard is now a cemetary where unidentified Jews who were killed in WWII are buried.